The Complicated Business of Plantation Tourism
Tourists walk past the former slave quarters of the Boone Hill Plantation in South Carolina. The plantation is a popular tourist destination near Charleston, where visitors can tour the main plantation house, the extensive grounds and the former slave quarters. JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES hide caption
Tourists walk past the former slave quarters of the Boone Hill Plantation in South Carolina. The plantation is a popular tourist destination near Charleston, where visitors can tour the main plantation house, the extensive grounds and the former slave quarters.
JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGESIf you go on one of the hundreds of plantation tours offered around the country, you'll likely be led through a stately antebellum mansion like something out of "Gone with the Wind."
Maybe you'll learn about the origins of the furniture, or the flowers that once grew in the garden out back.
But depending on where you go, you may or may not hear about the reason those plantation houses planted anything — or about who was really doing the planting.
Plantations have been tourist sites for some time, but many tours have failed to accurately depict the legacies of slavery. Today, some historic homes are singularly focused on telling the stories of the enslaved. But it is a history that's hard to hear: one that some visitors say outright they do not want to hear.
It's an ongoing source of tension for tour guides and re-enactors working at plantations and their visitors.
To talk through the complexities of plantation tourism, we spoke to Lacey Wilson, a historic interpreter at the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters; Niya Bates, the director of African American History at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation; Elon Cook Lee, program director and curator at the Center for Reconciliation and a historic house consultant; and Derek Alderman, the founder of Tourism RESET — a research outreach initiative focused on addressing racial inequality and insensitivity in the tourism industry.
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